I am unable to run apgluxe v5.09 in macOS Catalina because the utility "python3" cannot be found. Specifically, this happens when configuring the search for a particular rule. How do I repair this manually?

I am unable to run apgluxe v5.09 in macOS Catalina because the utility "python3" cannot be found. Specifically, this happens when configuring the search for a particular rule. How do I repair this manually?

This seems very strange because the build process specifically checks to see if python3 is available and if it isn't, falls back to python (which could actually be either python2 or python3). Presumably this is somehow related to the changes in Catalina regarding scripting languages.

The output from your './recompile.sh' command should give something that looks like

Unfortunately this will be a bit messy when it comes to updating apgsearch if the file "recompile.sh" changes, but that hasn't happened for some time. Just remember that you've made this change if in the future you've get errors when trying to update apgsearch.

====

But definitely it would be preferable to fix Python on your system. The file /usr/bin/python3 may just be a dangling symlink (executing

would tell you if that is the case).
Probably you could just delete the file "/usr/bin/python3", and if desired reinstall Python3 (via Homebrew or manual installation method). But without knowing how your system came to be in this state I wouldn't advise that you take this course of action.

The latest version of the 5S Project contains over 226,000 spaceships. There is also a GitHub mirror of the collection. Tabulated pages up to period 160 (out of date) are available on the LifeWiki.

This is clearly not the case. As i said before, i don't know enough about MacOS to understand what state your system is in. You might have some luck asking a question on stackoverflow.com, or on a dedicated MacOS forum.

The latest version of the 5S Project contains over 226,000 spaceships. There is also a GitHub mirror of the collection. Tabulated pages up to period 160 (out of date) are available on the LifeWiki.